IRAQI AIR FORCE Frankly, no one knows for sure why Saddam Hussein made any of the appallingly self-destructive decisions he made during the Gulf War and the lead-up to it. Saddam Hussein is proof that an audacious incompetent can appear quite effective, even shrewd, to those lesser souls unwilling to stand up to his challenges. He is a narrow-minded and arrogant man, with only minimal experience of the larger world around his nation, and a stunning unwillingness to recognize unpleasant truths. His career as Iraq's ruler is marked by nothing so much as his complete inability to recognize any other forces or facts in the world besides his own will. It is a measure of the frightening way things work in this world that he has been able to get as far as he has. It is a dubious enterprise to attribute rational motives to whatever passes for a brain behind those flat, dead, shark-like eyes, but it is even less useful to imagine that Saddam's disasters take place without an underlying plan, no matter how maladaptive. Why do I say Saddam, and not "the Iraqi High Command"? In a regime where high officers are routinely purged or executed for disagreeing with Hussein or for becoming a threat to him by being too competent, Saddam's dysfunctional neuroses are embedded in every decision made by his leaders, whether he is involved in them or not. The Iraqi Air Force, or Al Quwwat al Jawwiya al Iraquiya, was the most highly politicized of the Iraqi armed forces, having been involved in virtually every successful and unsuccessful coup attempt since 1936. It was therefore the most heavily purged of Iraq's armed forces, due to its potential threat to Saddam's power. This enabled the force to be cleverly maintained at abysmal levels of professional competence, with no inkling of airpower doctrine. However, this was not a problem, as Saddam's experience in the Iran-Iraq War convinced him that airpower was not a decisive weapon and was primarily of value as a deterrent force-in-being, never mind the theories of airpower or the facts of any number of recent wars. In retrospect, Saddam does not appear to have thought much beyond his belief that the Western Coalition would not have the nerve to stand up to his fait accompli, and certainly not have the moral strength to commit itself to an all-out war. Rather, he apparently expected to retain Kuwait by simple force of will and bluff. Instead of having a coherent plan for how to fight the Coalition for control of Kuwait, he had a handful of assumptions about how things would work out: the Coalition will not have the resolve or common cause to fight, the Coalition will fight in a manner that is to Iraq's best advantage and to its own least advantage, the Coalition will suffer severe losses, the Coalition will not have the stomach to take these losses, the Coalition will give up, that is the way it will work out. When war began, the Iraqi Air Force, like the remainder of the Iraqi armed forces, was paralyzed by a combination of disbelief and a lack of any coherent direction or forethought. In the absence of a real plan, Al Quwwat al Jawwiha al lraquiya fell back on predisposition and stasis: It was held as a force-in-being within hardened aircraft shelters, until maybe it could eventually be used to strike a telling blow at the morale of the Western democracies, causing them to weep, impeach their president, fold up their tents, and go home. Large portions of the Coalition Air Force would be tied down by the need to defend against this Tet in the sand, and Iraq's ground-based air defense network would take care of the rest. The plan failed, first because air power is like money and muck: "not good except it be spread [read: used]," and second because of the Coalition's ability to destroy the Iraqi aircraft bunkers (fancy that). The Iraqi Air Force was either destroyed within their bunkers, sat unattended next to cratered runways until shot up by the 24th Mech Division, or fled to Iran. (This latter event, if it represented an actual decision rather than a spontaneous bandwagon of desertion, has been described as a rational decision under the circumstances. Indeed, it follows the pattern set in earlier Mideast wars where Arab air forces sent their aircraft off to safe havens, although Iran was a poor choice as a safe haven. However, maintaining that this was a rational choice under the circumstances holds water only if one does not hold Saddam responsible for having painted himself that far back into the comer to begin with.) However, even though it ended up in the baffled hands of Iraq's mortal enemy, the Iraqi Air Force remained as a force-in-being as the Coalition was obliged to keep forces on alert in case a sortie was made from Iran. (Strangely, the sheer surrealism of flying the air force to Iran gave a perverse sort of credibility to that threat, as surely it must have been a devious trick, as no one could really be that stupid, could they?) However, the more cynical among us (like me) would point out that the main reason we kept an alert force to counter the Iraqi Air Force in exile was because we were hoping against hope to be in on the most amazing live-action all-F-15 William Tell turkey shoot MiG derby of all time. When Kuwait was invaded, the Iraqi Air Force had the following aircraft on hand (aircraft in CD/CA terms). Bombers 2 Tu-22 (1 squadron) 1 Tu-16 (1 squadron, combined with H-6D below) 1 H-6D (Chinese Tu-16 copy) Fighter Bombers 4 Su 24 (1 squadron) 20 MiG-23 (5 squadrons) 16 Mirage F-1EQ5-200 (Exocet-armed, 4 squadrons) 16 Su-20 (4 squadrons) 16 Su-25 (4 squadrons) 8 J-6 (Chinese MiG-19 copy, 2 squadrons) Fighters 10 J-7 (Chinese MiG-21 copy) 36 MiG-21 8 Mirage F-1EQ 6 MiG-25 8 MiG-29 Reconnaissance 1 MiG-21 2 MiG-25  Attack Helicopters (Army Aviation) 10 Mi-24 Hind 5 SA 342 Gazelle 7 SA 316 Aloutte 14 BO 105 3 SA 321 Super Frelon (with Exocet) Transport Helicopters (Army Aviation) 4 Mi-6 35 Mi-8/-17 5 SA 330 Puma 7 SA 342 Gazelle Iraq also possessed one of the world's most extensive AA defense systems, which defended Baghdad and other important targets. Much of this defense system was made up of stationary gun and missile sites, with the result that the Coalition either knocked out those sites that presented a risk, or flew out of their range. This was made simpler by the centralized nature of the Iraqi air defense command and control networks. By knocking out crucial command nodes, the separate air defense sites could be left to flop around uselessly until the Coalition needed to take them out one at a time. The Coalition's greatest aircraft losses were suffered early in the war by the RAF's Tornado GR. 1. These were directed against Iraqi runways, and were obliged to fly very low and very straight and level down the Iraqi runways by the nature of their JP 233 anti-runway munitions, and I don't need to tell you what happened next. Although the first day of the air war yielded a 3.3% attrition rate for the Tornado force, this rate dropped by the war's end: the GR.1s were credited with flying 3649 sorties during the war with six losses, for a loss of one aircraft per 600 sorties. IRAQI NAVY Other than its ability to mine the upper reaches of the Gulf, the Iraqi Navy had little impact on the war. The modem Iraqi Navy was still at the builders' yard in Italy, due to Iraq's failure to pay the bill in full. What small craft Iraq had in the Gulf were hunted down and destroyed early in the air war by the US Navy, Royal Navy, and Canadian Armed Forces Air Command. This included an amphibious assault that was intended to be coordinated with the land attack into Khafji, but which merely sank offshore. 1991 Persian Gulf War Supplement Part 2 On the Brink of a New World Order: Iraqi Forces CA TO&E Iraqi Air Force and Navy CA TO&E Iraqi Army CA TO&E Iraqi Republican Guard CA TO&E Sources Back to Table of Contents -- Command Post Quarterly # 5 To Command Post Quarterly List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by Greg Novak. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com